Alina Kleytman (b. 1991, Kharkiv, Ukraine) is a multidisciplinary artist whose
work across sculpture, video, and performance unravels the erotics of power,
the poetics of trauma, and the intimacy of control pushed to the edge of
absurdity. Calling her artistic approach hysterical realism, she creates
monstrous mythologies that mutate beauty, violence, submission, and
theatricality into seductive, disturbing forms. Dark humor often underpins her
work, turning provocation into a tool for destabilizing moral and emotional
certainties.
Kleytman fabricates relics for an empire that never existed, choreographs
rituals for wounds that never closed, and tailors prosthetics for saints no one
prayed to. Everything is too much: too loyal, too decorative, too obedient, too
broken to function—and far too glamorous to stop.
Her videos—part confession, part provocation—stage violence as both
spectacle and riddle. They drift between the suffocating rituals of private life
and the theatres of war, tracing a spectrum from intimate cruelties to
collective catastrophes. Through unsettling tableaux and caustic wit, Kleytman
distorts the neat divide between innocence and guilt, asking whether victim
and aggressor are opposites at all—two actors swapping masks. Beneath these
scenes runs an undercurrent of authority—its rituals, its costumes, its
borrowed language—shaped by stereotypes and the invisible scripts of social
expectation. Drawing from lived wounds and cultural archetypes, she creates
dark narratives where care curdles into threat, tenderness hides a blade, and
every embrace trembles between mercy and domination. Her moving images
refuse resolution; they lure, accuse, seduce, and trap—leaving the audience
complicit in the uncertainty of justice.
Her sculptures—often skeletal, ceremonial, or fetish-like—oscillate
between monument and relic, diva and debris. With an unruly fusion of
ritual and ridicule, seduction and subversion, Kleytman builds a
symbolic ecosystem of synthetic bodies and haunted objects, their forms
contorted under the weight of desire, obedience, spectacle, and collapse.
She draws from lived experience and speculative fiction, turning trauma
into dark glamour and catastrophe into choreography. Her objects don’t
merely perform—they overperform, trembling with too much beauty, too
much loyalty, too much grief to behave. Using materials like velvet, fur,
iron, medical plastics, and fragments from conflict zones, she renders
the body as both weapon and wound. Her works speak in tongues—part
mourning, part drag, part political satire—demanding to be seen not as
catharsis, but as reckoning.
Kleytman holds a degree in Monumental Sculpture from the Kharkiv
State Academy of Design and Arts (2012) and studied at the Rodchenko
Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia (2015). In 2020, she
co-founded the Dzherelo Art Pavilion in Kyiv with artists Nikita Kadan
and Bogdana Kosmina—a 24/7 public platform for radical artistic
practice.
A two-time winner of the PinchukArtPrize, Kleytman received the
Women in Visual Arts Prize from UN Women and the Ukrainian Institute
in 2021 for her contribution to gender discourse in contemporary art.
She is also the creator of DIRTY WHITE, a persona designed to absorb
society’s emotional waste—a vacuum cleaner for collective rage dressed
as a messianic mascot.